Robert Evans and Margaret Killjoy host a chaotic Christmas special featuring Sophie Lichterman before pivoting to Abba Kovner's harrowing resistance against the Holocaust. Born in 1918, Kovner organized underground cells in Vilna after Nazi-Lithuanian forces murdered thousands at Ponary, prompting him to distribute a December 1941 warning that Hitler planned total Jewish annihilation. While the Judenrat initially denied the genocide's scale to maintain order, Kovner's armed uprising marked a critical shift from survival to defiance, illustrating how early resistance emerged amidst systematic extermination and moral ambiguity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Cool People Christmas Podcast00:03:53
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We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
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Merry Hollandus.
It's behind the Chrisbastardness.
Robert Evans here.
Podcast God.
With me today is Margaret Killjoy and Sophie Lichterman.
Margaret, how are you doing?
I'm good.
I'm here for the Christmas song special.
Isn't what we're going to do is just sing Christmas carols?
That's right.
We're going to sing the version of Frosty the Snowman that I wrote while on an acid trip that takes seven and a half hours and is largely a retelling of the ring cycle.
Okay.
So yeah.
Also extremely pornographic.
So if you have children listening, you need to get them away.
It is actually a crime in 37 states for them to listen to my version of Frosty the Snowman.
Yeah.
And the worst part is, is that actually, if anyone listens to it, Robert goes to jail.
That's right.
That's right.
So, Margaret, you will be here to do the 26-minute long kazoo solo, which I'm very excited about.
I brought bells.
Oh, you did actually.
You do literally have bells.
Sweet silver bells.
Bells that are perfect for ringing in Christmas, which is great because this is our yearly Christmas episode.
Now, normally, Margaret, normally for Christmas, we do a non-bastard, right?
Like we do a hero to kind of pep everybody up at the end of the year.
But last year, and this year, really, you launched a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff that's basically a regular weekly version of the Christmas podcast, of the Christmas episodes that we used to do.
So this year, I'm doing something a little different, something we've never done before, which is we're going to be covering a group of people who were rad as shit for 80% of the story, and then things take a dark turn.
Zionist Families Under Attack00:15:51
So 90% of the revolutionaries in human history is chilling.
Yeah.
And this is, there's a lot of fascinating moral questions with the group that we're going to be talking about.
Have you ever heard about a terrorist group called Nakam?
No, I don't think so.
Awesome.
I don't know.
We'll find out.
Yeah, we will find out indeed.
Margaret, before we get into this episode, I want to do a little thought experiment for everybody here.
I want you to imagine that a few years down the line, a church or a political party rises up in the United States and starts trying to spread a fascist gospel around the country.
And this gospel takes off among a significant chunk of the population.
And let's say...
It's far-fetched, but yeah, far-fetched.
And let's say that these fascists are specifically targeting people like you and the folks that you love.
Whatever thing you identify as, whether it's gender orientation, religion, sexuality, political ideology, they're targeting like you and the people that you love.
And let's say, imagine they get into power, right?
Maybe it's a coup.
Maybe they actually just straight up win an election, but they get into power and a lot of violence falls, a tremendous amount of violence.
And you lose a lot of the people that you love most in the world, virtually all of them, over a terrifying period of years and years of violence.
Now, being fascists, they do eventually lose, which is what always happens to fascists.
And at the end of that period, you and the folks who have survived are hardened, are a lot better at doing violence, and are thinking, who do we make pay for this, right?
Who is it moral to punish for this?
Obviously, the ringleaders, right?
The people that were leading the movement, the people who did death squad shit, the people who were actually carrying out the killings.
But what about the churches full of clamoring extremists?
What about the civilians who supported the movement and bait and howled and cheered as they committed their murders?
To what extent are those people guilty, right?
Is it wise to just let them all live because the war is over?
Or by doing that, are you potentially endangering your remaining loved ones even more?
Because if there's not consequences, is it the case that maybe they'll do it again?
So that's a question to keep in your mind, right?
Okay.
As we start to talk about Eastern Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
That was a fun time to be around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's what we're going to be talking about.
And specifically, we're going to be really focusing on one individual today, a pretty fascinating fellow named Abba Kovner.
He was born Abel Kovner on March 14th, 1918, just as the First World War was ending, in a town called Sebastopol on the southern tip of Crimea.
Now, if you've casually glanced at European history, you will know that the southern tip of Crimea in 1918, as a Jewish person, is a pretty rough place to be.
That is not one of the top places and times I would choose to be born.
Now, Abel's parents were quite Orthodox Jews.
In The Fall of a Sparrow, a Stanford biography of Covner, they're described as moderately traditional.
I don't entirely know what that means, but that's kind of the way in which they're generally described by the best biographer Kovner has.
Now, Sevastopol did not have a large Jewish population.
This is not a city that has like a particularly significant, like sizable community in it.
And in czarist Russia, which is what Kovner's parents had lived under right up until about 1917, the ability of Jewish people to hold jobs had been strictly limited, right?
You can't really teach at colleges if you're Jewish.
At least you're heavily limited from doing it.
They have quotas.
There's a lot of different jobs you just can't do.
There's an apartheid system, really, in most of czarist Russia.
Now, luckily for Abba, by the time he's born, the czars are out of power.
And his family is, he comes into a fairly affluent family.
They're large and they're extremely close.
His father had been an expert appraiser of antique jewelry.
With the revolution of 1917, did Crimea...
What happened to Crimea?
Did it get into the USSR?
Did it do its own thing?
Yeah, it's part of the USSR.
Yeah.
But also 1918, things are a lot less.
Yeah, they're not very USSR at that point.
Yeah, yeah.
They're still kind of moving along, right?
Yes.
And his family is moderately well off.
One of Abba's earliest memories is sitting around the table at a family dinner and admiring his grandmother's pearl necklace, which had been in the family for 150 years.
So he has not just a large family, but a family that like they have managed a lot of continuity between the generations, which is not necessarily the most common thing in this part of Russia because of how many pogroms there are, because of how common the violence is.
The fact that his family has like managed to keep these things in their possession for so long says a lot, right?
Yeah.
Abba is a very smart child.
He is pretty much universally regarded as having been particularly a brilliant artist and very charismatic.
Everybody really likes this kid.
He's very inclined to the arts, particularly poetry.
And he had, his family members were called, he had a unique ability to memorize and recite things that he'd read.
And he would do this to keep everyone entertained, especially during holidays and family gatherings.
He would read books and then he would recite them to his family as like, you know, basically, it's the early 1900s in Sebastopol.
They don't have like TV or radio.
This is his best entertainment.
If I saw this YouTube video, this is what I learned.
Yeah, normal.
Only bearable.
Yeah, only bearable.
Yeah, he's like describing Andor to everybody during like the Seder or whatever.
Because this is the difference, right?
Like if you describe what happened in Andor, it sucks.
But if someone were to just act out Andor in front of everyone, that would rule.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen that movie?
I forget the name of it.
I think Rain of Fire is the name.
It's about like dragons destroy civilization and it's apocalyptic Britain.
There's a great scene where like a bunch of post-apocalypse survivors are like sitting around a campfire doing Star Wars for each other.
Yeah.
Yeah.
See, that rule is great.
Yeah.
That's what Kovner's doing.
He's very creative.
Everybody finds him very entertaining.
Now, this is, again, 1918, rough time to be anybody in Sebastopol, but particularly Jewish.
And his dad is arrested by Soviet secret police when he's four in 1922.
This is because private commerce was forbidden in the Soviet Union.
Obviously, in the earliest stages, kind of after the Tsar's fall, it's possible, you know, business and stuff continues in regions.
It's not like evenly distributed at this point.
But by the early 20s, the Soviet state is kind of starting to lock into place.
And he gets fined for his bourgeoisie decadence as being a jewel guy.
And he's put in prison for several months.
This has probably had, or at least his biographer, who is, I should say this right now, his biographer is like super pro-Israel and a Zionist.
His father is also a known Zionist.
And when I say this, all of these folks that we're going to be talking about in the 20s and stuff are Zionists.
That doesn't mean entirely the same thing that it does to this day.
In part because a lot of people who, a lot of Jews who are Zionist in this period are also socialist or also communist and are less thinking about, I want to establish, you know, a state of Israel as it currently exists, which is, shall we say, deeply problematic, and more we want to liberate like the Palestinian mandate from the British imperialists and establish a socialist community there, right?
And that's kind of the line ABBA's father falls in on.
His family is very left-wing.
One of ABBA's cousins is going to found the Communist Party of Israel when that all happens.
So like that's that's the so they are very left-wing, despite the fact that they're somewhat affluent.
But Zionism is not allowed in the Soviet Union, right?
Because a big part of it is like we're going to, number one, religion is not encouraged in the early USSR in particular.
But number two, a big part of it is that like, well, we're not going to stay here, right?
Like if you're Zionist, that you pretty fundamentally don't want to stay where you are in the USSR.
And they're also not thrilled with that.
So that probably played a role in his dad getting arrested.
And he stays in prison for months until the family can put together enough money to secure his release, which is interesting to me because he gets arrested for doing commerce and being bourgeoisie.
But he also richly not rich enough.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, whatever.
By 1926, the Kaufners had decided that the Soviet Union was not a great place for them.
They felt they're, yeah, yeah, especially since, again, most, they are fairly religious.
And they see kind of not just their religion, but their nationality is under attack.
So they decide to move someplace that's going to be a little bit more friendly for them.
It's also, again, Sebastopol doesn't have a huge Jewish population.
So some of it's just like, well, maybe we'd like to be in a place where there's a larger Jewish community.
I'm so nervous about where they're going to move to.
Well, they're going to move to a place that never has any problems in the early part of the 20th century.
Lithuania.
Oh, great.
Now, Lithuania is part of like Pol, specifically they moved to Vilna, which is today the capital of Lithuania, if I'm not mistaken.
But back then is part of Poland, right?
Yeah.
So they are attempting to, and they've got family in the area, right?
You know, so they're, they're not just like moving side unseen.
They have a lot of relatives there, too.
This is a good move.
And for a while, the family is affluent again.
But that period quickly ends because Abba's father seems to be a really generous guy.
And in this period, because of the civil war in Russia, because of all of the chaos after World War I, there's a ton of refugees moving into Vilna, right?
And his dad kind of spends money faster than he can make it, helping out other refugees in the area because he's a pretty nice guy.
Abba, you know, goes to a Hebrew school and then he goes to an art university when he graduates.
I think it's called a gymnasium.
I don't entirely, I believe that's broadly speaking like a set or a primary school.
That's my impression, but I always get confused whenever I'm in Europe and people talk about going to gymnasium.
Look, everyone does schools wrong, but Europeans particularly do schools wrong.
And I think it's okay to admit that.
They at least name them wrong.
However, they name them very wrong.
I think the U.S. overall does schools a little bit wronger.
Yeah.
I hate the word gymnasium, and I'm angry at them.
So that's fine.
I'm biased here.
But he goes to a Hebrew school and then he goes to an art university.
And he is studying, I think, specifically poetry.
And he's actually being published as a poet.
He's quite good.
And he's studying poetry when things in Europe start to take, well, I say start to take a dark turn.
He is in Vilna in the 1920s.
It's been dark for a while, but they start to get a lot darker in the early 1930s.
And again, Vilma is a part of Poland that is smack in between Russia, which has just gotten through a civil war that's killed millions, and Germany, which has just gotten through like a famine that killed like a million people after World War I.
And they're on this slow road to fascism.
It's a terrible place to be.
And they're about to get split up between the two nations.
Boy, are they ever, Margaret?
Are going to agree to invade together and then hold joint fucking parades.
It is going to be a tough.
It's, again, one of the worst places you could possibly be in this period of time.
Yeah.
So Abba's father dies in 1932, right as Hitler's rising to power in Germany.
You know, he's just, he's a stressed out guy.
I think he's kind of older.
It's not uncommon for the man to be significantly older than his wife in this period in time.
He dies and his mother, Abba's mother, is forced to support the family by starting a restaurant.
And this is very difficult to her because she had a chronic injury to her legs.
So his mom is like one of these parents who is like physically disabled and also taking the burden for feeding and supporting her entire family onto herself by starting a restaurant.
But she's a very good cook.
It is a successful restaurant.
Okay.
In 1935, when he was 17, Kovner dropped out of Hebrew school, having decided that his studies were useless and the teachers were all old assholes.
By this point, he was convinced.
Yeah, he is hard not to like in this period.
And he's convinced in this point that his future lay in Palestine as a pioneer.
Now, all throughout Eastern Europe in this period, Jewish communities are watching the spread of radical political ideologies that often adopted anti-Semitism as planks of their belief.
Young people, young Jewish people who are paying attention to these trends started to form their own youth organizations.
And these are both for a mix of like self-defense and to aid them in carrying out this kind of migration over to Palestine, right?
And not all of them.
Some of them are communist organizations that are not Zionist, right?
Communist and socialist organizations that are organizing along left-wing lines and plan to stay.
That's also a significant portion of this.
But all of these Jewish youth organizations are based heavily on the Boy Scout movement that had been launched by Robert Baden-Powell.
Because it is a quasi-military movement, right?
Yeah.
That oddly makes sense.
There was a lot of that going on in Europe around that time where there was a lot of like hiking clubs would be where you would like go learn discipline and marksmanship and hang out with your buds.
Yes.
And it's not hard to see why a lot of Jewish youths in a place like Vilma would be like, yeah, we should probably be like training for some of this stuff, huh?
Yeah.
It looks like shit might get a lot harder very soon.
Yeah.
So I want to read a quote from the Jewish Virtual Library about these youth groups.
Quote, many Jewish youth affected by the process of modernization, which had begun among Eastern European Jewry, sought a means of maintaining their Jewish identity and culture outside the stifling barriers of the shtetl and the Orthodox Jewish life.
On the other hand, they were troubled by the crumbling of the foundations of society around them and by the growing anti-Semitism which threatened their very existence.
In its early stages, the movement was heavily influenced by the Boy Scout movement organized by Baden-Powell, and it embraced scouting as a basic principle to teach ghetto youth self-reliance, outdoor life, and a love and knowledge of nature.
Another important influence upon them was the Wandervogel movement in Germany, which emphasized youth's independence and creativity.
And the Wander Vogel movement is, there's a mix of the Nazis that are kind of like inspired and related to it.
And there's also a lot of reaction to it because one of the things that happens in the Wandervogel movement is a lot of German youth are having gay sex.
Yeah.
And they go camping, right?
Yeah.
Which is one of the reasons camping is rad.
And that is the thing that the Nazis do not like.
We'll talk more about the Wandervogel movement.
Okay.
Yeah, no, yeah.
I covered them a bunch on the Gay Resistance and Nazis episode.
And so like, I'm pretty excited about how both the like right and left wing were like deeply part of the Wander Vogel movement.
Revolutionary Communist Split00:08:30
Yeah.
It's very interesting and messy and cool.
And it's a cool thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We don't, it doesn't get talked about much.
This is all stuff that like you really like the messy shit.
No, no, no.
And it's, it's stuff you have to really be reading your history in order to actually get to.
Yeah.
Once you do, you realize like, oh, this was central to a lot of what was happening in this period.
Yep.
So there's a lot of these groups.
Some of them are revolutionary and communist in nature.
Others are kind of centrist and even conservative and are much more focused on Zionism.
And again, when we talk about Zionism in this period, some of these people are, we're going to like take our own state in Palestine by force.
But a lot of them are just, we're probably all going to get killed if we stay here.
And like farming in Palestine seems like a better life.
So what if we just did that, right?
Yeah, there was like right wing and left-wing Zionism that are like dramatically different.
And then even among left-wing Zionism, I think that there was kind of a split about whether or not they were trying to create a state or whether they were just like basically trying to go live where they were kind of originally from.
Yeah, and where like they wouldn't get murdered.
And you do have to, when you're kind of parsing this out, keep that all in mind.
They're all aware that they're under the gun here.
Yeah, it's really weird to look at this from the current context of Israel being an apartheid state.
It's a great thing.
Yeah.
But the right wing versus left-wing Zionism versus also the left-wing non-anti-Zionists, like all three groups were doing their thing.
Sorry, I get really excited about this stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
They're all also, there's a tremendous amount of conflict between them.
Yeah, totally.
And part of the story today is how a lot of that conflict comes to an end and why.
The specific youth group that Abba Kovner joins is called Hashomer Hatzer.
I'm sure I'm not getting that quite right.
But it was kind of, I've heard different things.
They are a Marxist group.
They are a Marxist, like socialist youth organization.
I've also heard them described as kind of like soft socialists.
So they're more compared to the people who are like outright communist revolutionaries.
They're a lot more moderate, but they are Marxist, right?
They're not just like social democrat.
They are specifically using Marxist analysis in their propaganda and the way that they see the world.
Abba's cousin, again, becomes like the founder of the Israeli Communist Party.
So this is like a whole thing in his family.
And it's interesting.
You might suspect because his dad gets arrested by the Soviets, because his family has a tough time in the USSR, that they might have had, there might have been a reactionary strain in them and they would have like pulled away from those politics.
But that's not really, that's not at all really ABBA's like his, that's not, that's not the tack that he takes.
We'll talk about that a little bit in a second.
But the Hatzomer Hatzer advocated for Jewish people to abandon the industries they'd traditionally worked in in places where they were living and instead become laborers and farmers so that they'd be able to settle in Palestine one day and all of that stuff.
Some of them had started trying to do this as early as 1919.
They are sending, there are people moving over there.
This is how the first kibbutzes get established, right?
It's these guys.
So by the time World War II is getting ready to kick off, and that's in the background, as ABBA's joining this group, as he's kind of moving up the ranks, he's becoming a community organizer.
He's making propaganda.
The Nazis are taking power and consolidating power.
You got your light-along knives.
You got your Anschluss.
You got your warbell starting to ring for the invasion of Poland.
Now, on kind of the eve of the invasion of Poland, the Jewish population of Vilna is about 60,000.
And it's one of the most cohesive Jewish communities in all of Europe.
It hosts what's called the Strachen Library, which is the most famous Jewish library in all of Europe.
Abba spent a lot of time in that library, and he spends the years in the run-up to the war, kind of throwing his life into the Hatshomer Hatzer, and he eventually becomes like one of the leading figures in his local chapter.
This passage from a book about Abba called The Fall of a Sparrow describes him just as the war clouds began to gather in Europe.
He headed the local branch, its governing body, and the regional leadership.
His physical appearance was also exceptional.
He wore his hair long and dressed like the older Haschomer Hatzer members, with his shirt collar rather than his jacket collar uppermost, wide pants stuffed into his socks, and in later years, into his boots.
His dress was influenced by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and he turned it into his own personal style.
Kovner wrote an exceptionally beautiful Hebrew, a great deal for the group's newspaper, which was posted on the clubhouse wall.
His sense of humor was well known in the movement's summer and winter camps.
He was as familiar with happiness as he was with sadness, said one friend.
He was always an intellectual challenge.
He had an original way of asking questions or discussing problems and impressed everyone with his self-control and seriousness.
The younger members admired him, and the movement's instructors recognized his leadership qualities.
He radiated authority, they said, 50 years later.
And that's one of the things you'll notice about Kovner, because a lot of the people who knew him then get interviewed again, like literally half a century later.
And there's almost this awe they all had for him.
He's just a deeply charismatic young man.
Yeah, he's just one of those people that is kind of magnetic to folks.
Which means he also do terrible things or possibly terrible things.
He could.
And it's one of, he doesn't seem, one thing that he does not seem to have any particular personal desire for power, which is interesting.
He's really focused on organizing, but not focused on kind of like, there's no sort of a cult of personality.
He just seems like a deeply likable kid.
I don't know.
Yeah, certainly at this point in time, he's nothing but rad.
And again, it's interesting that he's very focused on kind of cultivating this image of himself as a Bolshevik, especially considering the problems that his dad has.
But his earliest memories, he never, because he's very young when the family is affluent, he doesn't remember that period at all.
His earliest memories are after they move to Vilna when they're very poor, you know, when his dad dies, when his mom's got to try to keep the family together.
And so he is very dedicated to the poor.
He's very familiar with kind of like class consciousness, and he's very humanist.
He's a secular guy, right?
Like he's not particularly religious.
He is a committed Marxist.
He's a very good person, basically.
No, no, no.
He grows up a committed Marxist who's very aware of like the divide between rich and poor, you know?
Everything changes in his life on September 1st, 1939, when Germany invades Poland.
At once, they begin to implement the early stages of the final solution, which had not yet been fully plotted out, but was broadly understood by the Nazi elites.
They started forcing Jews into ghettos, and mass killings were common in the parts of Poland that the Germans took over.
Thousands of men were taken at gunpoint and put into forced labor battalions.
Now, by the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which is the treaty that the Germans and the Soviets sign before the partitioning of Poland, Vilna is in a portion of Poland that is invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union.
As things begin to settle down and the new Russian occupiers start to take effective control, it became clear that the youth movement was going to be forcibly disbanded.
The issue was, of course, Zionism, which the Russians wanted to discourage.
Rather than risk being split up or disrupted by secret police, Kovner made the decision to have his organization go underground.
Officially, the Hatzomer Hatzer had ceased to exist.
In reality, it was just hiding.
Dina Perat in Death of a Sparrow writes: The underground's first task was to find or invent new methods for continuing their activities.
As soon as the younger Hashomer Hatzer members understood that they were not being dispersed, but rather that necessity dictated a new modus operandi, they enthusiastically began to construct underground cells.
They were organized by the leadership into groups of five, a method learned from reading pre-revolutionary literature, recounted Kovner.
And only the most reliable members were accepted.
Key members were sent to places outside Vilna, disguised as Christians in private homes and outside the city limits.
They continued to study Hebrew, hid books taken from the great libraries closed by the Soviets, which had been the heart and symbol of Jewish Vilna, and even held a few seminars.
Hiding Underground Structures00:04:37
And again, at this point, their primary goal, they're helping refugees.
They're trying to continue to carry out the practice of their religion, the study of their history.
And they're also continuing.
They're not able to continue to help people immigrate over to Palestine right now, but they're trying to keep that infrastructure set up so that they can again one of these days.
Yeah.
Now, they're not an insurrectionary organization at this point, and they don't have any desire to fight a rebellion against the Soviet state.
But they just want to be able to keep doing their shit while the Soviets are that.
And Kovner and a number of others are aware that shit with the Nazis is going to cook off, and there will be a need to fight at some point.
And so they are kind of consciously setting themselves up in a structure that will be able to survive and resist in the days that are coming.
And those days come pretty quickly.
On June 22nd, you know what comes before other things.
What's that, Margaret?
It's the ability for people to exchange money for goods and services.
That's right, Margaret.
That's really the most revolutionary activity: exchanging money for goods and services.
Absolutely.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wild Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food, they cannot feed their kids, they do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here, the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Kugler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You mean the president?
You think English is the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
La Vlog Cruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
What color?
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, Not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
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Ah, we're back.
I got my socks tucked into my fucking boots because I'm a radical.
What if you start with him tucked into your socks?
That was the look that I was more nervous about.
When he had his pants tucked into his boots, that's always a solid look, right?
No, no notes.
Tucked into your socks.
Warsaw Ghetto Massacre00:12:30
I don't know.
I got to see it.
I'm going to believe it.
What about having your boots tucked into your socks?
What if you put your socks on the outside of your boots?
If you're attempting to move across terrain in ways that you don't leave noticeable tracks while doing things at night, I've heard that that's a reasonable thing to do.
Well, this has been Margaret's advice on how to carry out an insurrection.
Welcome.
Now it's time to go back to the story.
We've just been talking about Kovner and his fellows are kind of preparing themselves for the future inevitability of a guerrilla war.
And that inevitability becomes inevitable, I guess, on June 22nd, 1941, when Germany institutes Operation Barbarossa, which is still the largest military operation in human history.
I think they invade with like three and a half million men or something.
It is a Titanic operation.
And if you're not.
Much like the Titanic.
Yes.
Yeah.
It ends a lot worse than the Titanic.
It can't fail.
But it goes great for a while.
Again, like the Germans carry out the largest encirclement operations that have ever happened.
There's like million man blocks of the Soviet army that are just like annihilated or surrender or whatnot.
It's a whole big thing.
It's not going well for them at first.
And the Germans fairly quickly enter the Lithuanian portions of the USSR, including Vilna.
This comes as a shock.
Kovner's ready for something to happen, right?
He's not shocked by the fact that the Nazis do Nazi shit, but everyone's shocked at how poorly the Red Army performs, right?
By the fact that they fall apart so quickly.
And so they don't really, they're not able to get away from this, right?
Some Vilna Jews, handfuls, are able to escape, but nearly everyone is trapped by Luftwaffe bombardment and Wehrmacht encirclement.
So Vilna is going to be, because it's one of the first large Jewish communities that the Nazis take over during Barbarossa, and they're going to use it as kind of a proof of concept, right?
They are testing out extermination on Vilna.
It's one of the first large Jewish communities that's going to be annihilated by the Germans.
Now, when they go in and start exterminating people, most of the actual killing is being done by members of the Lithuanian right wing, members of actually kind of adjacent to these Jewish youth movement organizations, right?
These right-wing clubs and paramilitary organizations who had been underground under the USSR.
That tracks.
But when the Nazis take over, they're like, hey, we would love to take vengeance on Lithuanian leftists and Jews.
And the Germans are like, absolutely, guys.
And I'm going to quote from Dina Parat again.
When Einsatzkommando 9 entered Vilna in early July, it immediately became clear that the wave had reached the city's Jews as well.
Einsatzkommando 9 belonged to the Einsetzgruppen, the SS units that followed in the Wehrmacht's train, and their principal mission was to kill the Jews and Communist Party activists who had remained behind.
The activities of national Lithuanian institutions were drastically curtailed, and only those dealing with urban matters were left intact.
The Lithuanian police force was placed under SS command, and right-wing units were integrated directly into it.
That left little behind the facade of Lithuanian independence, and the Lithuanian murder of Jews, whether committed on their own initiative or under German aegis, brought them nothing in return.
The coordinated effort of the two German authorities, the SS and the army, and the Lithuanian units, began on July 4th and marked the beginning of the oppression and eventually the destruction of the Jewish population in Vilna.
The German military government issued decrees, which the Lithuanian Urban Administration put into operation.
The Einsatzgruppen sent Lithuanians to kidnap and murder Jews, sometimes participating themselves, where the Wehrmacht kidnapped Jews for forced labor.
The Jews called the Lithuanian kidnappers chapuns, and some were local youths who had received a small bounty from the Germans for every Jew turned in.
They broke into homes at will, robbed and beat with no fear of retribution, and made the lives of the Jews intolerable.
These are the proud boy types, right?
The oath keepers and shit.
Yeah.
That's how the Germans are doing it here.
It's fitting because, like, when the Nazis take over, they just use the existing police force and then added more right-wing stuff to the existing police force.
This is that tracks.
Yeah.
Yeah, that it it completely tracks.
There's a lot going on here that, again, is going to become very common among the rest of the areas the Nazis have taken.
And it's because, number one, these Einsatzgruppe units are not great at most things.
They're certainly not good at anti-partisan conflict.
Okay.
There's not a shitload of them.
And it's kind of, again, most of them are like not like the participating in these mass killings like leads to a lot of suicides and drunkenness among the Einsatzgruppe.
So whenever they have the opportunity to use locals to do the killing for them, they're going to prefer that just because it kind of preserves German unit strength.
There's a number of reasons why they do it this way.
The Jewish community in Vilna is taken wholly by surprise by this.
Many chose to hide themselves in an attempt to survive.
Kovner recoils at the prospect of hiding and of fleeing the ghetto.
But he does.
He's kind of forced to, right?
Because members of his organization are like, no, we're going to get killed if we stay here.
We have to try to like hide with Gentiles who are friendly elsewhere in the city so that we can take action later.
Kovner agrees to do this, but he writes that he's covered in shame by the idea of hiding in a closet.
He is a fighter.
He does not want to be hiding.
But sometimes you have to make strategic decisions about when and where you fight.
Yes, and they do.
And he takes shelter in a group in a Dominican monarch or a Dominican convent.
That's like these nuns, by the way, this is normally a show.
Generally, when we bring up nuns on this show, it's very negative.
These nuns are based as shit.
These are the coolest fucking nuns I have ever heard about.
You're going to love these nuns.
Hell yeah.
So these nuns take Kovner and a couple of his friends in, and they are, you know, trying to like, he agrees to do this, but while he's locked up, he's sending out letters.
He's arguing whenever he gets face to face with someone that we need to get back in the ghetto to fight back and defend like our community.
Part of this is because his girlfriend gets he doesn't he doesn't get to escape with her.
She stays in the ghetto, and for a couple of weeks, she's sending him letters about how bad the conditions are, and then the letters stop abruptly, and they never pick back up again.
And he doesn't know what's happened to her.
She's obviously she's been killed.
Yeah, um, but he doesn't, he's he's not able to find that out.
He has no good information about what's going on.
And in the early days, all these all the Jews in Vilna have are conflicting rumors about the slaughter.
Because what the one of the ways the Germans carry out the massacre is they put together a second ghetto, and this provides them with the ability to move large numbers of Vilna Jews without making it seem suspicious.
We're not, you know, we're taking you to the next ghetto, and then these guys all get taken out and massacred, right?
But they don't have to say we're going to kill all these people, and there's a little bit of plausible deniability, so it stops a panic from taking like happened in Andor in the jail scene, exactly like that.
Um, so most of these people, which is tens of thousands of people from mid to late 1941, are taken to a place called Ponari, which had previously been a picnicking spot, and they were gunned down and tossed into mass graves.
Most of the actual killing, again, is done by Lithuanian right-wing partisans.
One local witness to the slaughter later wrote: 11th July, lovely weather.
It's hot out.
There are white clouds and a gentle breeze.
Shooting can be heard from the forest, presumably from training.
The shooting started at 4 p.m.
Then I was informed that many Jews were transported to the forest via the road to Grodno and were then shot.
This was the first day of executions.
A depressing feeling.
The shooting stopped at about 8 in the evening.
For the Germans, 300 Jews are 300 enemies of humanity.
For the Lithuanians, 300 Jews are 300 pairs of shoots, of shoes, trousers, and clothes.
Damn, that's such an interesting way of breaking it down about like, well, the Germans hate the Jews and we just want to steal all the shit from the Jews.
Yep.
That is a big part of what is happening here.
Yeah.
So that's good.
When the Germans occupied Vilna, the ghetto has, again, a population of 60,000.
I've also heard 80,000 because of the refugees.
There's not, you're not going to get, there's not like a census, right, being taken that's that's particularly good.
By December of 1931, though, less than a third remain.
40.
Which is like 20 to 30.
Yeah, December of the same year.
So in less than a year, they go from 60, 70,000 people to 20-ish thousand.
Cool.
Because of how many are massacred.
But while these massacres are occurring, because the Germans, there's some plausible deniability, and there's not great, again, there's not like the internet, social media, there's not like a lot of good ways to figure out what's happening outside your door.
So a lot of Vilna's Jews still don't believe that the annihilation is being carried out.
Yeah.
What's happening in Warsaw?
Part of this is.
Well, and part of why they don't believe it is they have friends and relatives over in Warsaw.
And at this point in time, a lot of the correspondence that the Vilna Jews are getting from their relatives in the West is that, like, yeah, there was some killing earlier, but it's calmed down.
And like, we think it's going to be okay.
And again, this is also, we're talking centuries of Jewish history where, like, yeah, there will be these eruptions and there will be massacres, but then things will calm down again.
You have to deal with some bullshit laws, but like, we don't get wiped out, right?
Um, and that's kind of what people think is happening.
Um, and so there's this, there's this belief among a lot of the sort of even though a lot of people have been killed that, like, it's not going to be as bad as it is, as it clearly is.
Yeah, and this, again, I'm saying this: these people are not like irrational, they're not weak, they're not shitty, they're dealing with an unprecedented situation, right?
Now, as early reports of German atrocities start to leak out in the middle of 1941, the standard belief, so there's this group, and this is every ghetto, right?
There's an organization called the Judenrot, which is rot is like a it's spelled rat, like the animal, but it's like a governing council, right?
This is just like a general word in the area.
And the Judenrot is the governing council of the ghetto, right?
And the Nazis endorse and establish Judenrots in the ghettos that they take, you know, control of to make people think that they have any control over their own lives.
Yeah.
And it's, it's a mix of some of these guys who are part of the Judenrot are, as with you find in any community, like self-serving assholes who they get better kind of conditions and better food by doing this.
A lot of them, though, are just people who are, well, if we work with them, we can avoid getting massacred.
We can like reduce the amount of violence our community has to suffer.
Again, they're and again, a lot of like people in specifically radical organizations are really angry at a lot of the folks who agree to be in the Judenrot.
Obviously, I'm not going to come down morally on anybody who's trying to survive the fucking Holocaust.
This is a fucking nightmare.
But in this case, you know, there is, there are these, reports are starting to filter in to the ghetto.
And the Judenrot's official line is that the killings that have occurred outside of Vilna are the results of an isolated, crazy German commander, not a broad policy of genocide.
And it's going to be okay, right?
Their job is to keep everybody calm.
And that's what they're trying to do.
I feel like the Judenrot is like, in the end, it was the wrong call, right?
Yeah.
But they didn't know it was the wrong call.
The people who joined it, at least, again, the only one I've like looked at is the one in Warsaw.
And it was like a lot of the people who are part of the Judenrot were like, yeah, this is how we think we will best survive this intact.
And they were wrong.
But they were wrong.
But they didn't, there was no way to know they were wrong besides like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're not wrong because like they were bad people or whatever.
They're wrong in part because this was not in a lot of times in which Jewish communities had faced danger in the past.
Stuff like this had been the right thing to do.
The Wrong Survival Call00:04:01
Yeah.
Right.
Had been the thing that preserved the community.
Yeah.
Again, this is just an unprecedented time.
They are wrong, but I have no interest in morally judging any of the people making decisions in this impossible situation.
Oh, the products and services that support this podcast, Margaret.
They think all times are precedented as shit.
And they don't care about you.
Yeah.
But that's because we care about them.
It's a one-way.
Yeah.
It's like an anxious versus, it's like an attachment style problem that we have with ads.
Oh, I would just say that we have so much love for them that there's no cosmic space for them to love us left.
It's our fault.
Yeah, it is our fault.
Yeah.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's financial literacy month and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Paul show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Kugler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Blah, blah, blah.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
What color?
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at like it's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Russia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T. Everybody's talking about.
As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
I understand the game.
As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ah!
We are.
That's because we think.
That's right.
I think we're the first people to come up with that idea.
Yeah.
Nuns and Extermination00:10:54
So these guys, you know, again, we have no interest here in morally judging the members of the Juden Rod.
But the fact that they make this choice to try to convince their people that annihilation is not imminent, it's not going to be the right thing to do, right?
It does not wind up helping the matter.
In late summer, a number of women escape from mass graves at Polnari.
And this is a thing that happened, right?
These are, you know, either they're wounded, but they survive or they kind of feign death and they wind up under a pile of the corpses of their loved ones and then dig themselves out in the night and they make it back to the fucking ghetto or back to Vilna and they manage to find like friendly people to talk to.
And they try to warn everyone, right?
They try to be like, no, guys, like they are going to kill us all.
They're already doing it.
And again, I'm going to pass over to Dina Perat here.
The Judenrot forbade anyone to meet with them, but even individuals far removed from the Udenrot had the greatest difficulty in believing the survivors' accounts.
Pescia Aronowicz, who arrived wounded at the home of Dr. Mark Tworecki, the ghetto children's physician, managed to convince him, although he hesitated for a long time before believing her.
Others, however, were certain she had gone mad, and she stopped telling her story.
It was in Vilna in Lithuania, the first places in Europe to see mass murders, that people began to doubt the stories of those who had escaped death, whether they recounted them to Jews who lived nearby and were candidates for the same fate, or to those living in safety.
Perhaps the opposite was true, that those who lived near the killing pits and the train stations from which the transports left did not believe, because if they had, they could no longer have continued living.
This is the I know that there's no bottom to the worst thing that one could experience during this time, but this is up there.
You survive a mass shooting.
I mean, a mass grave situation.
You survive execution.
You crawl out underneath your friends and family.
You go and warn everyone.
And everyone is like, okay, Cassandra, you're just crazy.
Yeah.
Because they can't believe the enormity of what you're telling them.
Yeah.
Fuck.
And no one believes women.
I mean, I.
Well, yeah, that's probably not a part of it too, right?
So Abba Kovner, like most Vilna Jews, did not know what to do at first because he's not getting, he's not, he hasn't sat down face to face with all these people.
He's just, it's just rumors, right?
And it's rumors that he's hearing while he's hiding underground in a Dominican convent, right?
Now, he does eventually succeed kind of in late summer, early fall, in leaving the convent and moving to a safe house in the ghetto with some of his comrades.
And in September, a group of two women and one 11-year-old escape the burial pits and make it back to Vilna.
They visit a doctor, again, who is a member of the Hatzomer under Abba Kovner.
So this is a guy who's like one of his boys.
And when the doctor hears their story, he invites Kovner to come and talk to them.
So for the most part, Kovner spent the early months of occupation focused on smaller tasks, right?
He's establishing communications lines.
He's helping get safe houses.
He's getting his people in position.
He's trying to facilitate their movement wherever he can.
And this is the first moment, because he's kind of just been keeping himself busy.
This is the first moment where he's forced to come to terms with the fact that his community is being exterminated.
His immediate thought was that he needed to kill himself.
He just wants to die.
Like the second he learns that this is happening, his immediate urge is to commit suicide.
Yeah.
Which is valid.
Yeah.
But of course, yeah, literally any reaction would be valid.
Yeah, exactly.
But of course, he can't, he decides, he can't, he wants to do that, but he can't do that because his people are in danger.
So he decides to opt for the next best thing to suicide, armed resistance.
Now, let's get back to those nuns I was telling you about.
Yeah, I'm really excited about this.
I'm really excited when Catholics actually do good.
The mother superior who had hosted, who had hid Kovner and his friends in the convent had been distraught when they left.
She did not want him to leave.
She wanted to help.
She repeatedly told him that she wanted to fight alongside them.
She's a pretty good ally.
And after hearing a bunch of this, Kovner basically tells her, if that's how you really feel, get us some weapons.
And so one day in December of 1941, she shows up in full nun garb outside the ghetto with a bunch of hand grenades hidden under her head.
Fuck yeah.
That's fucking rad.
That is quality nunning.
She has officially won my favorite nun award.
Yeah.
So good on you.
There's a ton of really good ones.
There's the whole like thing.
Have you seen the map of like Catholics versus voters for the Nazi Party in Germany?
Yeah.
It's just an inverse map.
Yeah.
Which is interesting, of course, because Catholics were very down with fascism in Spain at literally the same time.
But like, it's just, it's interesting.
I find it interesting.
Look, there's like a billion of them.
Yeah.
You know, there's, there's a wide variety of Catholics.
And this, this one rocks.
She tells him that she wants to join the Jews and fight with them because God is now in the ghetto.
That is her, like, it's very, I think this is pre-liberation theology, but she is very much like, the place for me is with the people being oppressed because that's where God's going to be.
Totally.
Which is fucking base.
Smuggling grenades into the ghetto in your habit is radish shit.
And she is like, let me come.
I want to fucking kill some Nazis with you.
I need you to go back to the convent.
Like, this is how you can help us best.
We're not ready to do that yet, but thank you for all of these hand grenades.
He later wrote, quote, I mixed in with the column of Jews returning from their day of forced labor.
I felt my soul torn.
What would happen if the grenade fell from my hand or if I tripped and fell?
And because of me, a whole community were to trip and fall as well.
Till that day, I had never touched a hand grenade.
I didn't know how to use one.
So he's got some weapons now.
He doesn't really know what to do with them.
That's a process, right?
So while he and his partisans plan for their first attacks against the German occupier, Kovner puts it upon himself now that he knows what's happening, that he knows the stakes are complete annihilation.
He takes it upon himself to put out a warning to the rest of Europe's Jews.
The mass killing of the Holocaust had started in Lithuania, and Vilna's Jewish community was among the very first to be wiped out.
Jews further west still had no idea what was coming for them, and the international community knew even less.
He had to warn them.
So the same month he gets those grenades, December of 1941, Kovner writes a message that is soon smuggled into ghettos all across the East, particularly in Poland, and makes its way out of Nazi Europe and across the world.
I'm going to read it to you now.
Jewish youngster, do not trust those that deceive you.
Of the 80,000 Jews in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilna, only 20,000 have survived.
In front of our very eyes, they tore our parents, our brothers, our sisters from us.
Where are the hundreds of men who were abducted for labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers?
Where are the naked women and children who were taken from us on the terrible night of the provocation?
Where are the Jews who were taken away on Yom Kippur?
Where are our brethren from the second ghetto?
Whoever was taken out of the ghetto gates never returned again.
All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponari, and Ponari is death.
Hitler is plotting to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.
It befell the Jews of Lithuania to be first in line.
Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter.
It's true, we are weak and defenseless, but the only response to the enemy is resistance.
Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers.
Resist to our last breath.
Yeah, I fucking like this guy.
Yeah, yeah.
This is the first major warning that comes out that like what is on the table is complete annihilation.
Kovner is the one who gives it.
So that's where we're going to end part one.
All right.
Yeah.
Lots of good stuff.
Well, well, actually, I mean, I don't know.
I have no idea what's going to happen next.
It is.
This is a fascinating story, Margaret.
But at this point, I mean, Kovner's an amazing man.
And at this point, like a guy who is handling himself impossibly well in an impossible situation.
As are a number of other people, including that bass-ass fucking mother superior.
Yep.
What a rad lady.
So think about that and go smuggle hand grenades to someone who...
Well, maybe.
Probably should just...
Margaret, you got some pluggables to plug?
I have a story about nuns coming out.
Oh, you do?
Or rather, I have a story with some nuns in it.
I have a book called Escape from Incel Island that does what it says on the title on the cover.
And it is coming out from Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness on February 1st.
And you can pre-order it at tangledwilderness.org and get a free poster of the cover.
It's a really cool cover.
I think people will be excited about it.
It's a cool cover.
It's a very good book.
And you know, when you think about it, Margaret, the Vatican is kind of an in-cell island.
Yeah, it is.
I'm sorry.
The Catholics are definitely the good guys on this episode, but I couldn't resist that one.
That's fine.
I guess they're Volcell, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely Vol Cell.
Sure.
Ostensibly.
Ostensibly Volcell.
Yeah, that's what I got.
I also have a podcast people can check out called Cool People stuff.
It's really good.
Oh, thanks.
Margaret's there.
Jeff.
Sometimes Robert's there.
Sophie is always there.
Yeah, I'm always there.
I'm also sometimes on Substack, where you can find me.
Yeah, it's shatterzone.substack.com.
Check that out.
I write things usually one thing every week so you can read more shit from me if for some reason I'm not in your life enough.
Anyway, go to hell for the Sun Stack.
Robert, we're doing, there's a Behind the Bastards show at SF Sketchfest in January, right?
Really?
You'll be there.
Really?
Behind the Bastards Show00:02:29
Okay, I've never heard you do that voice before, and I didn't enjoy it.
I'm just letting you know.
Yeah, I didn't enjoy it either.
It was a little loud.
Honestly, I feel terrible about that.
But yeah, it's January 20th, get tickets via SF Sketchfest.
I don't know.
There's probably a link.
Hell yeah.
I won't make the sound sketchy joke again.
I already made it once.
I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed it the first and second time.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Excellent.
And bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this seasonal Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.